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Cassy Clay Comes Home


The scooter wasn’t where she had left it, Cassy had made sure to prop it up next to Mel’s when they went into the neighborhood Seven but it was gone. The two girls stood in stunned silence, Mel happy that it wasn’t her Razor and Cassy dreading going home with out hers. Her Dad had said there wouldn’t be another one if it got lost or stolen and her Mum hadn’t wanted her to have one anyway because they were dangerous. Everyone else at school had one and none of them had got hurt but Cassy felt her Mum was a bit of a fraidy cat sometimes. Cassy wasn’t even supposed to go on the monkey bars at the park or at school but she did anyway. Cassy’s large cornflower eyes scanned the parking lot, whooping when she spotted the prized silver and pink scooter across the lot in between two cars. She ran over, hoping it hadn’t been wrecked, sometimes the big kids could be mean and would wreck little kids bikes just to laugh. Real a-holes her dad would say.
The girl was too focused on the scooter to hear the door of the dusty brown Chevy groan open behind her but she felt a shadow fall over her before a large rough hand clamped down over her mouth and she felt her self lift off the pavement. Some one was screaming, Mel she thought but then there were other adult voices yelling. Her head hit the passenger door and she didn’t hear anything after that.



2

The cops spent the first week looking to bring Cassy Clay home, then several months scouring every inch of land or water to bring the girl’s body home but in the end they had nothing to offer the Clay’s but thin hope that perhaps the girl was still alive. No one on the case really held that hope, most kids killed in the first hours or days after an abduction and those that didn’t… you didn’t want to think about that. People who took kids weren’t lonely old ladies or childless couples as one would hope. The men who snatched little girls and boys from their families did it out of lust. When these men had sated their desires the kids were tossed as garbage is, sometimes found but mostly left in secret lonely graves. The alternative was often to terrible to imagine, years of torture and degradation that no parent could fathom in their worst nightmares but cops knew too well could happen. Detective Rick Downes had witnessed it, the ones who were found long after their tormentors had moved on. Parents overjoyed to have their long lost child finally come home only to be crushed under the weight of what their children had endured and the reality that there was no easy fix, no starting where they had left off. Sometimes it was better to hope they died quickly.